(Belated) Happy New Year to all DBpedians!

>> (Belated) Happy New Year to all DBpedians!

Mar 3, 2017 • Sebastian Hellmann • DBpedia - Germany

(Belated) Happy New Year to all DBpedians!

We are a proud to look retrospectively at a successful year 2016 and would like to welcome 2017 with our new newsletter (~4 times per year), which will allow you to stay up to date and provide feedback, e.g. via the included survey and the planned events in 2017.

New members - We kickstarted the DBpedia Association with a first wave of new members: OpenLink Software, Semantic Web Company, Ontotext, FIZ Karlsruhe, Mannheim University, Poznań University of Economics and Business, the Business Information Systems Institute Ltd and the Open Knowledge Foundation Greece joined the DBpedia Association in 2016. We created two web pages that summarize reasons to support DBpedia via donations and become a member.

DBpedia in Dutch http://nl.dbpedia.org is the first chapter which formalized an official DBpedia Chapter consortium. The cooperation was initiated by Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and Huygens ING (research institute of History and Culture). Other partners like imec/Ghent University, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and the Network Institute (Vrije Universiteit) joined as well. This cooperation will strengthen the DBpedia Dutch chapter and community of contributors as well improve the cooperation with the Dutch research infrastructure and the Dutch Digital Heritage.

We are in intensive contact with the Japanese, the German and the Italian chapters to form official chapters and gain institutional support for DBpedia. You would like to know how to start a DBpedia chapter? Please check here.

DBpedia Releases - Since 2015 we provide bi-annual DBpedia releases. The latest one, 2016-04, featured a new Wikipedia references & citation dataset for the English Wikipedia. In addition, we separated the data which we received from heuristic-based infobox extractors from the already mapped and quality-controlled data to remove low quality data and avoid duplicates & low quality information. We improved on our Wikidata extraction and mapped all our data to Wikidata-based DBpedia IRIs. Wikidata will become more and more the core of future extractions.

Consortium partners for EU and national projects - Since its conception DBpedia has never been funded directly, but was supported only by individual tasks in different projects and by the spirit of volunteers. With the establishment of the DBpedia Association, we are now in a position to receive direct funding and are eligible as a full consortium partner for EU and International projects. Furthermore, we are able to mediate trusted partners - who have worked with us in the past and contributed greatly to DBpedia - for national proposals in over 30 countries worldwide (contact via reply to this email.)

Events - In addition to our participation in the 12th edition of the SEMANTiCS, in the 19th International Conference on Business Information Systems and in the Google Summer of Code project, we arranged three DBpedia community meetings, in The Hague, Leipzig and Sunnyvale, California. In order to get updates on our events and projects, stay tuned and check the DBpedia blog. Please check out the dates to the two new DBpedia meetings below.

Links - We have revived the portal, that allows the LOD community to contribute their links, so we can include them in DBpedia Releases. If your database links to DBpedia, you can submit your links here . We provide additional support for this and also provide a service, that - once you have contributed your links - will tell you which data is linking to your knowledge base via DBpedia http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/, available only for Association members.

We would like to thank again all people who were involved to enable this!

2017 - New Year - New Opportunities

To make 2017 as great as 2016 we have already reviewed community feedback and worked out some plans to bring the DBpedia community closer together whereas we attain our goals and follow our visions. Below are the most important points for 2017.

User Survey - Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board prepared a survey to assess the direction of DBpedia and the DBpedia Association. We would like to know what you think should be our priorities. Please take a minute and vote here.

User support - We set up a new portal to streamline support requests for DBpedia. We would encourage you to submit all questions to http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support.

And … if you are already an experienced DBpedia user, you can sign up and answer questions and get kudos. Upon request, we can issue a certificate for your CV. During the course of 2017 we will also provide a priority support channel for members and Chapters.

Save the Date - Galway 21 Jun and Amsterdam 14 Sep. DBpedia will be part of the Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) conference in Galway, Ireland (Submission open until Feb 16th). This new biennial conference series aims at bringing together researchers from across disciplines. The DBpedia community will have a full day event on 21th of June 2017. Also during the SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam, Sep 11-14 (Submission open until May 17th or June 23rd), the DBpedia community will get together on the 14th of September for a DBpedia community meeting. Updates will be posted in the respective events section and the blog.

TextExt: DBpedia’s Open Text Extraction Challenge - http://wiki.dbpedia.org/textext As DBpedia and Wikidata currently focus primarily on representing factual knowledge as contained in Wikipedia infoboxes, we created the DBpedia Open Text Extraction Challenge. Participants are asked to submit their engines that extract facts and knowledge from Wikipedia article texts to dramatically broaden and deepen the amount of structured DBpedia/Wikipedia data.

Community coordination - You’d like to get involved in DBpedia? We set up a new Get Involved section. If you are interested in details or would like to get in touch with the DBpedia community, please read here.

Community chairs - The active community of developers and engineers comes together in the DBpedia community committee. We will build up this committee with the help of Pablo Mendes and Magnus Knuth who will serve as provisional chairs. The committee can be joined by recommendation only based on merit. If you would like to get in contact with the community committee please check here.

Two delegates from the community committee are elected chairs and will take seats at the Board of Trustees. This board is the main decision-making body of the DBpedia Association and oversees the association and its work, as its ultimate corporate authority. There are four board meetings per year, please have a look at the public minutes here.

Technical development I: Wikidata - Many DBpedians are excited about the progress Wikidata is making and we are planning to use Wikidata’s data as the new core for our extraction and fusion. This means that in future releases we will fuse data from Wikidata with the usual data we extract from over 100 Wikipedia language editions with additional data from other high quality LOD sources and do the usual refinement, typing and quality-control. We hope that this will provide an unprecedented knowledge graph with superior coverage, completeness and correctness.

Technical development II: UnifiedViews - our plan to achieve the above mentioned fusion will be realized by an active collaboration with the Semantic Web Company (SWC), where DBpedia developers work side by side with the PoolParty Semantic Suite technical team to add scalability, provenance tracking and linking/fusion capabilities into the Data Processing Units of the UnifiedViews workflows.

Technical development III - For 2017, we hope to establish further hands-on collaboration with companies and organisations to push all aspects of DBpedia, in particular: search and visualisation, ontology maintenance, querying and indexing crawling data from web and social media. We also work together with our members to prioritize on integrating data that they think useful.

Membership - If you would like to become a member of the DBpedia Association, please check all benefits here..

If you require any further information, feel free to contact us by replying to this email. We are already very excited to spend time with you on further community meetings and to publish new DBpedia releases.